Building Bots to Grind in Star Wars Battlefront 2

Not familiar with the term “grinding”? Well, this is the act of doing repetitive and often menial things in a game in order to gain experience points or acquire resources. Sometimes it means repeatedly killing some low level enemy, sometimes it means simply running around for a long period of time.

This isn’t a video game blog, so I’m not going to get into the frustrations people have with how grinding and microtransactions are integrated into Star Wars Battlefront 2, but it would be an understatement to say that people are frustrated. Sariel, a prolific builder of Lego things, has expressed this frustration by building a robot to do the grinding.

Servers for most modern games have complex systems in place for detecting “bots” or programs that help people cheat in one way or another. In this case though, the “bot” is a mechanical robot that happens to have enough randomness programmed in to avoid detection. While the robot doesn’t accomplish any task in the game, you can see that the sheer act of  being perceived as active on the server over time offers its own reward.